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A Woman and a Sister Too? The Intertwining of Emancipation and Early Feminism

Photograph

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) Autograph letter, signed, to Ann Phillips, 1 May [1866?]

This letter from Stanton to Ann Phillips, Wendell Phillips' wife, demonstrates the intersecting networks between abolitionism and feminism in the years following emancipation. She tells Anne to convince "that glorious husband of yours" to join the suffragist movement, and she compares the status of disenfranchised white women to that of slaves. And yet despite her lack of rights, Stanton was a wealthy white woman with far more freedom than slave women. Nevertheless, Stanton's petition seems to have been successful, for Wendell Phillips began championing universal suffrage.

bMS Am 1953 (1477) – Gift of Crawford Blagden, 1978.